A new day for Old Town

As a theater artist, Sean Murray has made plenty of definitive statements on local stages. But as he looks around at the Old Town Theatre, he seems stumped by what, exactly, he should call this place.

“It's a large, intimate theater,” he says at first. “Or, an intimate, large theater.”

Here's one thing he can call it with certainty: Cygnet Theatre's newest home.

Not quite 6 years old, the rapidly growing Cygnet is about to take its biggest step since artistic director Murray and his partner, executive director Bill Schmidt, founded the company in a humble strip mall near SDSU in 2003.

After signing a 10-year lease last January to run the 248-seat Old Town space, Cygnet has spent about $600,000 revamping the once barnlike house, with brand-new seats, modern lighting and sound systems, a remodeled lobby and a long list of other improvements.

On Friday, the company introduces audiences to this new second home, as previews begin for Murray's own adaptation of Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol.”

The space feels much bigger than Cygnet's existing, 157-seat house in the Rolando District, which the company

will continue to operate. The renovated theater sits in the heart of touristy Old Town and is best known for hosting long-running commercial shows such as “Forever Plaid” under its previous management, Miracle Theatre Productions.

But Murray insists the move does not foreshadow any kind of shift in his company's adventurous, off-Broadway-style sensibility.

“One of the things we've aimed for is to do plays here that are similar to what we've done before,” Murray says. “Not to change our mission or change our style at all, but to really bring a subscription model to this theater, which I don't believe has happened here.

“We are re-branding the theater. It'll be a new experience.”

Cygnet gave a preview of things last March, when it staged a production of Stephen Sondheim's “A Little Night Music” in Old Town, making do with rented lighting equipment and modest cosmetic touches to the theater.

Since then, the company has been busy not only remaking the place, but remaking itself – hiring new staff and embarking on a $975,000 capital campaign (now nearly completed), like a boxer bulking up to join a higher weight class.

“All those people hanging lights? At Rolando, it's usually just the designer on a ladder,” Murray remarks, as he watches crew members scurry around the inside of the house on a weekday in mid-November. “So taking over the space meant we had to bring in more people.”

Schmidt adds that “as you can see, the set is a little more complicated” than what typically goes up in the Rolando space.

Or, as Murray puts it: “Bill and I can't build it and load it in a weekend.”

The transformation startles Manny Fernandes, who has the longest history with the Old Town space of anyone here. Now Cygnet's marketing director, he was director of ticketing and technology for Miracle, where he spent a seven-year stretch.

It was that company, run by Jill Mesaros and Paula Kalustian, that took the somewhat moribund space and proved it could be a major success, as evidenced by the five-year run of “Forever Plaid” and two-year run of “Beehive.”

Though he has fond memories of that time, Fernandes says the theater's renewal “feels great. It was kind of scary to come back – I thought I was done with the building forever. I was the last employee out the door, the last one on Jill and Paula's payroll.

“It's just more elegant,” he adds of the new look. “I was walking into a barn for seven years. There are still hints of it around – enough to be nostalgic, without actually having to deal with it.”

Though the theater is part of Old Town San Diego Historic Park, it's not actually a historic building; it was built in the late 1970s. Still, it has to conform to park guidelines in keeping with Old Town's 19th-century theme.

The lobby has been repainted mostly in muted greens, drawn from a state-approved Victorian palette, with replicas of kerosene lamps on the walls; Cygnet took cues from the parlor of the nearby McCoy house in conceiving the look.

The interior of the theater itself has been updated more boldly, to tone down what Murray calls “this rustic brown, 'Let's put on a show!' facade” that dominated the space.

“It's a modern theater,” he says of the space, whose seating capacity puts it at about half that of the Old Globe Theatre, and about the same as San Diego Rep's Lyceum Space. “It needs to feel historical, but since it's not actually a historic building, there are certain things we didn't do.

“The idea is that as you go from street to stage, it becomes more and more a modern, contemporary theater, so you don't have this weird anachronism.”

One other state requirement Cygnet has to follow is an education component, involving some sort of historical programming in the park three days a week. That doesn't affect the theater's onstage efforts, though, and Schmidt says the company hopes to use whatever historical material it develops to jump-start its own education efforts.

Murray says “A Christmas Carol” was chosen as the first “official” Old Town show based on when the theater would be ready more than anything else.

But he has a long history with the show, having worked on several versions of it during San Diego Repertory Theatre's 30-year string (recently ended) of staging the classic.

“It was a tradition I always liked,” Murray says. “It was a show that meant a lot to me. So I felt that especially here, we could do something that could become a tradition. We could do our own adaptation.”

The one he's come up with, which features original music by George Yé, “is very traditional,” he adds. “It's strictly Dickens, straight out of the book. The focus is on the story. It's not the music or the dance numbers. The focus is a Victorian ghost story.

“So we're hoping it'll be scary and uplifting and redeeming and joyful. And ghost-y.”

After “A Christmas Carol” closes, the theater will next house the San Diego premiere of the Tony-winning play “The History Boys.” Cygnet will continue to alternate shows between Rolando and Old Town, with some overlap at times; one of the benefits of the dual-theater setup is the reduction of down time between productions.

Later, in one of the more ambitious undertakings in the company's short history, Cygnet will bring to Old Town the controversial Sondheim musical “Assassins,” about the various people who have slain (or at least tried to knock off) American presidents.

Taking wing

That kind of bold choice has been a Cygnet signature from the start, when Murray and Schmidt launched Cygnet with an August 2003 production of the edgy and flamboyant glam-rock musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

A year earlier, Murray had announced he was leaving North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, where he had been artistic director since 1998. (Conflicts with the board figured into his departure.)

Though Murray wasn't sure what he wanted to do next, he and Schmidt – who've been life partners for 15 years – “decided we wanted to go into something together.”

The theater veteran and the software engineer “talked about how the kind of work that was being done at North Coast while I was up there would do really well in San Diego,” Murray says.

And, Schmidt adds, “there was really no small theater doing it at the time.” (Although soon enough there would be, with the rise of such young, ambitious companies as Moxie Theatre, Ion Theatre and Mo'olelo Performing Arts Co., plus New Village Arts in Carlsbad.)

When it came to the name, Murray was inspired by his talks with the ageless Craig Noel, founding director of the Old Globe Theatre and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2007. Murray has long admired Noel's commitment to theater, as well as the way he shepherded the Globe over the decades from a small local company to a national powerhouse.

The Globe is named for Shakespeare's legendary theater in Elizabethan-era London. That theater's chief rival at the time was the Swan Theatre. A cygnet is a young swan.

“The original idea (for the name) came from wanting, very tongue-in-cheek, to be the Globe's main competitor,” Murray explains. “That was going to be our ambition, as this young strip-mall theater: 'We're going to take on the Globe!'In good-hearted fun.”

That kind of understated humor has served Murray and Cygnet well, particularly as the company has gone through some growing pains.

While its Old Town production of “A Little Night Music” was a success, drawing 11,000 people (some 3,000 of whom were new to Cygnet, says Schmidt), Murray caught some criticism for using a canned score instead of a live orchestra.

For “Assassins,” Murray says, there will be a four-piece band, somewhat similar to the setup of two keyboards and drums that was used for the show's original off-Broadway production.

Murray can't resist adding, with a sly smile, that the musicians will be “very much live. If they're not live, it's not because of me. It's because they didn't eat right or something.”

The little swan has a playful side, and some new digs that'll soon be full of plays.